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How to Learn Any Language – A Comprehensive Guide (No Shortcuts or Hacks)
Humans all learn languages the same way. There are many different methods, but the actual mechanism of how we learn to understand and use a language is the same in every human being. This might surprise you, and you might even be outraged at such a bold claim, but I am fairly certain that you will agree with it by the time we’re done here.
This guide will show you how we learn languages, that is, how our minds acquire a new language, the mechanism by which we actually learn. Then I will propose a method for you to do it yourself if you are so inclined.
There are plenty of people on the Internet and otherwise who give advice on language learning. Many of them provide us with useful information; some of them are outstanding language learners or language theorists. A few of them have been very important to me personally in my own language learning.
What I would like to do with this guide, however, is to go deep and answer the following questions: How do we learn languages as humans? How can I, if I actually want to learn Spanish or Russian, learn that particular language? Does everybody really learn the same way? Does one have to approach each language differently? What seems to be the most effective and efficient method of learning a language?
This guide is for everyone who is interested in language learning in general or who wants to actually learn one language or several languages. There is lots of advice about the details and minutiae of language learning freely available on the Internet in general and also on this blog. This essay is a bird’s eye view of the matter.
I’m afraid it is therefore rather long. If you’d prefer to print it out, a PDF version is available here.
You could also get my book Language Learning for (Reasonably) Smart People, on which this article is based.
If you’re still reading you might ask: Why did you give it such an obnoxious and self-righteous sounding name? For one, because I am arrogant of course. Then also because I would like to clear up the myth that you need to be smart and have a particular talent for language learning. This is wrong. I deal with the question of talent elsewhere, and I will touch on it in this guide.
Whoever you are, be assured that if you can read this blog, you can also learn a language. Any language for that matter. Here’s how…
The Method(s) of Language Learning
People have learned languages for longer than they have lived in houses. It is something that comes naturally to humans in a sense, and I think that’s why the actual process is not very complicated and almost everybody can do it to some degree of success.
The Canadian polyglot Steve Kaufmann – who incidentally is one of the people I learned a lot from – likes to say that there are three main factors in learning a language that will determine how successful we are: motivation, time spent with the language, and the ability and willingness to notice. Let’s call this the Holy Trinity of Language Learning. Steve has learned about 18 languages so far, to varying degrees naturally. He knows how to do it.
At this point it really depends on who you are. Have you ever learned a foreign language? If not, you might intuitively think that people like Steve Kaufmann are freaks of nature. “Surely no normal human being can learn over a dozen languages,” I hear you think. “You must be joking. I’ve been desperately struggling to learn Italian for 5 years, and I’m still losing that particular fight.”
Alright. Why is it not working for you? Or maybe you aren’t in a desperate situation like this; so let’s call our poor fellow here Horatius. Horatius has tried to learn Italian for 5 years. He just doesn’t seem to get anywhere. Let’s look at how he learns.
He’s very diligent, mind you. He took two years of Italian in school. Then he went to university, and here he has now been taking classes for three years. In all this time he has almost always done the exercises his teachers told him to do. He read the grammar explanations quite carefully indeed. He even memorized more vocabulary items than he needed to pass his classes. He has now a C1 certificate according to the Common European Framework of Reference.
His only problem is that whenever he meets a real life Italian, he can’t actually talk to him. Sure, he can say things like “Mi chiamo Horatius. Piacere.” He can order pizza just fine too. He can’t, however, talk about interesting subjects in a semi-complex way, let alone extemporaneously. Why is that? Is he just an exception? You know he’s not.
Methods in Schools
Remember your school days. Maybe you even are still in school or university and experience this phenomenon first hand. There are a bunch of people listening to the teacher, doing exercises, doing their homework, sometimes even diligently, compiling lists, doing silly little role-plays, and yet…
None of them can actually speak, even if their life depended on it. After three years of French classes, they could not tell a random French passer-by what happened to them, what they wanted, that they needed help or food. “When’s the next bus coming?” He won’t find out. “Why don’t you bloody well speak English?”
He can’t say any of these things, let alone talk about skydiving or Shakespeare, about Balzac or bowling with the French.
It’s always the same thing. After three years, or five. How many students from any given class actually succeed in learning the language properly? 10%, 5%? Fewer still?
In Canada French native speakers learn English in school and vice versa. Everybody knows that they don’t actually learn it though. The government even pays subsidies to their employees for learning the other language and awards bonuses for bilingual Canadian officials because it is far from the norm.
How is that possible? If you spend 5 years reading about history, you will have a reasonably good grasp on history, at least if you read broadly enough. If you spend five years learning how to make tables, you are likely to be able to actually make one; and a reasonably good one at that. It might even be useful and pretty after five years. If you spend five years studying mathematics, you better be able to do simple calculus.
How come that it’s so different in language learning?
Is learning a foreign language just so hard? Can only children learn languages with ease? These might be reasonable assumptions given the data from Canada and your personal empirical experience from school. If there weren’t places like Sweden in this world.
Natural Linguists around the World
In Sweden they learn Swedish and English. And guess what. They can actually speak bot languages reasonably well. In fact, you can find more extreme examples, where the most extraordinary polyglottery is commonplace, like in some multilingual hotspots in Africa.
So it must be a question of methods. Surely the Swedes, for instance, aren’t just genetically superior when it comes to language learning. It must be the way they lean languages. The methods in school don’t necessarily differ much from other Western countries’ practices, although teachers often have a higher degree of freedom. The important point is how Swedes tend to interact with English outside of school. More on that later.
However, this is the crux of the matter. Almost everybody at least learns one language successfully. Millions and millions of people learn more than one language. Some people even learn 20 languages. One might assume that talent plays a role when we get to the extremes but it certainly can’t be a decisive factor in language learning generally, given the data we just discussed above.
Polyglots aren’t mythical creatures like they are presented to us in books like Babel No More by Michael Erard. The author roams the world, meeting or otherwise finding out about these strange people who speak more than five languages, these polyglots and even hyper-polyglots.
It’s a decent enough read, but it treats successful language learners like people with strange mutations. That’s all wrong. If you want to learn a language, you don’t need the right mutation but the right method.
Here’s another bold claim: Anybody who can learn one language, can also learn a bunch more.
How does one learn a language then?
Steve Kaufmann’s Holy Trinity in and of itself doesn’t present us with a method.
One can incorporate these principles in all sorts of plans and activities. Most contemporaries in the West are supposed to learn foreign languages in school and the method that’s used to teach them seems to consist in some sort of sustained torture over a period of several years.
Now, most people know that one doesn’t learn a language if one is learning it in school. When they later look back, they think something along the lines of: “Damn, I had French for four years and I don’t remember anything but Bonjour! Time to get back to it and learn it properly. I still got my grammar book and my dictionary. Let’s get started!”
So they think, because they were lazy kids they didn’t learn despite the best efforts of the teacher; and indeed at one level of analysis that is most likely accurate. One can’t learn a language if one has neither the motivation nor spends the necessary time with the language, let alone notices anything. Hang on, you might say, five years seems like an awful lot of time. Correct, and I promise that if you do it properly you can easily learn French, Spanish and Italian in five years.
The pupil in question didn’t, however, really learn French for five years. It was probably something like this: The teacher said “Bonjour!” and then she handed out some work sheets with grammar exercises. Depending on when and where exactly our pupil attended school, he was also encouraged to participate and speak and – God help him – maybe also asked to take part in funny little games and role-plays.
He was forced to speak early, when he didn’t have anything to say and could only mumble and stumble with bad pronunciation in a very artificial situation. But that is all wrong. It doesn’t matter what exact variation of school language torture one undergoes, the likelihood that one will learn the language in question is near zero.
Almost nobody you know has learned a language in school to a level where he could sustain a conversation on a complex topic for fifteen minutes with a stranger and pick up a book and read it, or even just read the newspaper without strain. Why is that?
Well, the actual time spent with the language in modern classrooms is in fact very little to begin with. Say, you have three hours a week – lesson hours of course, so it’s more like 45 minutes per hour. Then you get some homework, which you may or may not do. Then what is it that in the three hours you actually do?
In most cases the pupils will go through a course book, which has some short texts and conversations, many grammar explanations and many, many tedious exercises. They will talk some of the time in the language itself, some of the time in English or whatever the language of instruction may be. They will be forced to read aloud the short texts and conversations and they will do the exercises etc. Since there are twenty or thirty people attending the same class, they will only get to speak for maybe a minute or maybe five if they are lucky or out of luck, depending on how they look at it.
By the way, I am not saying that all teachers are incompetent and that it’s their fault. Some are, some aren’t, and many of their efforts are laudable. The problem lies in the approach itself. One simply doesn’t learn a language through a combination of classroom and grammar exercises and a little bit of speaking.
How does one learn a language then?
Massive Compelling Comprehensible Input
Alright. The most effective and efficient (and also at the same time most pleasant) way to learn a language is using massive compelling comprehensible input. The savvy linguists and the more ambitious language learners will immediately recognize this formulation.
That’s Stephen Krashen, one of the foremost linguists of our time. If you don’t know what this means or only have a vague sense of what it might mean, then don’t worry, everything will be explained.
Let’s return to our discussion of other methods for a second, so that we can see why they don’t really work and why what works does work.
I claimed that using what the normal school classroom offers, grammar explanations and exercises and some speaking, does not normally lead to success. Naturally, there are cases of people who have learned a foreign language while they were in school, either entirely on their own – some people, say, learn Russian or Japanese in their spare time – or which is, though not common more common: they have learned Spanish or French or German, or some other language they were studying in class, because they also spent time with it on their own. They read a lot or watched TV-shows in the language. Here we get closer to the massive compelling comprehensible input.
Then there is the university or otherwise non-school language classroom. Here the methods vary widely, from a continuation of the school classroom (majority of university language classes) to experimental methods, like Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS); though a bit too new-agey for my taste, this approach is vastly different from and more efficient than what they do in most schools. TPRS is essentially a marriage of Krashen with the classroom.
You can’t Speak Yourself to Fluency
Very popular is the speak-yourself-to-fluency approach. Among the well-known online polyglots, an Irishman named Benny Lewis is the main proponent for this sort of method. He holds that one can become fluent in three months by essentially talking to people. This is more or less the way we learn our first language. Children just sit there and listen and then try to say words and get meaning across. After a while, almost all of them are successful. Obviously it therefore does work. One could argue, though, that what children mainly do is listening. They start speaking, when they have acquired enough words and have gotten used to language itself. Since it’s their first language, this is a different animal anyway.
However, the reason I would call this a rather absurd method, is because it reduces the learner essentially to being like a child. This is also the major critique that people who are not persuaded by the idea of mainly using input for learning levy against that approach.
Yes, they say, you can learn by listening like children, but doesn’t that then take years and years, just like with children?
Among the Internet polyglots, this is a point brought forth for example by Olly Richards. I do agree with him: We shouldn’t learn like children because we are adults and we have superior intelligence to children, so we can strategise, apply methods and focus on certain aspects of the target language etc. We also have much more discipline – at least an adult should have much more discipline than a child, and he therefore can learn in a concentrated manner, regularly and following a plan, having goals in mind.
The thing both adult and child should have in common, when it comes to learning a language, is that both should listen before they finally speak, when they have something to say. I don’t like speaking, when I can’t speak yet.
Why should I talk to other people and bother them with my stumbling and bumbling, when at this point the other person could quite literally have a better conversation with a small child? There is a reason to speak early, for some people, but it is not a linguistic one but rather a psychological one.
Even Benny Lewis appreciates the fact that it’s no use talking to people, when you don’t understand anything – which would be similar to an anthropologist, who tries to understand the language of some illiterate tribe, which can take a whole life-time.
So Benny Lewis also learns on his own a bit, before he goes out into the world, and then he doesn’t really achieve that high a level in most of his languages anyway. He does provide motivation to people, but I am afraid it’s not exactly the right kind. You can’t speak yourself to fluency in three months, though you can, admittedly, achieve quite a bit in three months, if you do it right.
If you go down the line of online language learners, we will find a combination of input and grammar used by people like Olly Richards, whose website I will teach you a language is rather popular. I enjoy his work and would also recommend you have a look at his website and take a listen to his podcast.
He is a strong proponent of flashcards, which I am not, at least not for language learning. They have a limited use, but not for what they are mainly employed, which is learning the bulk of one’s vocabulary. That should be done through input, because it is much more efficient. Olly has also recently come around more to Steve’s and my approach, so these days the gap isn’t that wide anymore (He now even offers short story books, which of course are comprehensible input.)
Now, what do we mean by input and why should we use it for language learning? Input in this context means mainly two things: reading and listening, preferably, whenever possible, at the same time. Krashen claims and – I would say has proven – that one learns languages essentially like this:
One has to read and one has to listen. A lot.
The things one has to read and listen to, should be interesting, if possible compelling, and should be comprehensible, at least somewhat.
Normally a few questions arise in the minds of the language learning novice. How should I read something, I don’t understand? I want to learn the language in the first place, don’t I? Same thing with listening. I can barely make out the sounds and you want me to listen to something? To what exactly? I don’t even know the grammar rules; how could I possibly understand anything? Also, yes, I might want to occasionally read and listen to things in the new language, like read a book or a newspaper or watch a movie, maybe Clint Eastwood’s Dollar trilogy in Italian, but I am mainly interested in speaking.
All of these questions are valid and I would answer: fair enough. I want to make two things clear right from the start. Through reading and listening you will learn the language in all of its dimensions. You will be able to, of course, listen and read, and most importantly to speak.
It is counter-intuitive and therefore the onus of prove lies with the one who proposes this method. However, that it works is proven beyond doubt. Linguistic data shows it, I have learned quite a few languages this way myself and I know of many people who have done it this way. Nobody has to take my word for it, either. One can easily look up Steve Kaufmann and the other successful polyglots online and watch their success – which is also useful if you are interested in that motivation we talked about earlier.
Finally, one can just give it a try. If you don’t get positive results after a couple of weeks/months, you can still go somewhere else. I highly doubt that will be necessary though.
What Makes Language Learning Hard?
What is the main obstacle when learning a language? Many people would probably say: Learning the rules. This is wrong. The rules and patterns are important and they are what enable us to speak clearly and elegantly, differentiate time and relationships etc. The main obstacle to speaking a language fluently, however, is the words. There are thousands and thousands of them and we need to understand many thousands of these passively and also use a smaller yet still considerable number of them actively, while expressing ourselves, in order to speak fluently on a wide range of topics.
Steve Kaufmann likes to compare the words to the metallic rabbit chased by dogs in hunting. Words are what we must constantly focus on and chase. While we observe the language in our listening and reading, while we focus on patterns, phrases, different tenses and whatnot, the real challenge is to pick up as many words as possible. Without them, we can neither understand nor say anything. If we were to use bad grammar or even only talk in primitive infinitives and in the present tense, we would still be able to communicate basic meaning, if at the same time we knew the words.
More importantly, we can almost always understand the gist of what someone says to us, when we know the words they use, even if we are not familiar with all the finer shades of the tenses and grammatical relationships in a given sentence.
This does not work the other way around. If you were to learn the different tenses and rules without knowing thousands of words, you wouldn’t be able to understand what most people say most of the time, let alone speak yourself.
If President Clinton had wanted to learn a language, he should have put up a sign saying: It’s the words, stupid!
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(Compelling) Comprehensible Content
The basic idea behind the input hypothesis is that we learn to spontaneously produce language (at will, when we want to speak or write) by first understanding (comprehending) new messages (that is to say, the meaning of what is said or written) that are slightly above our current level. In these chunks of language we understand some words and are familiar with some patterns, indeed with most, but we don’t understand everything.
Through knowing the context, we can then understand the meaning of new words etc. by seeing them in their context. We understand enough of the context to deduce the meaning of what we don’t understand. Once we have understood the meaning of these new linguistic entities, they will become part of what we can understand and eventually of what we can say.
This way, through exposing ourselves attentively to new materials and doing this often enough, we will progress through the language, building on what we know already.
Which brings us back to the Swedes. They are among the peoples who mainly watch foreign movies and television with subtitles rather than dubbed versions. This is why the overall level of English in Sweden is so much higher than, say, in Italy where they mostly use dubbing.
Most people will immediately understand the idea, since this is how they have learned their native language as well. Only think back to how many words you have learned since you’ve left school; or if you still are in school, then compare your current literacy level to that of your former self five or ten years ago.
We learn words in our own language by reading and listening to all sorts of materials and people. We read for pleasure and business, and learn about all sorts of things, and have all sorts of experiences doing it. However, one of the greatest benefits of reading widely, is learning new words, and learning to express ourselves better.
We don’t even know when it is happening, but if we think back, everybody who has read a good deal in his life, will have noticed that he will now be able to understand and even use words that he never looked up in a dictionary and that no teacher or course book has ever taught him.
The learning curve is not steep anymore, since we understand our mother tongue very well and only encounter new words occasionally, depending on how much we read and how widely and attentively we do so.
It’s mainly an unconscious process and it is the same thing in learning foreign languages; or language acquisition, as the linguistic term has it. I use the word “learning” throughout this article, although I want to stress that linguists like Krashen differentiate between active, conscious learning, and unconscious acquisition. There is some sense to that, since this describes more accurately what is going on when we “learn” to speak a language.
Active study, in the sense of doing exercises and learning with conscious effort, working on specific aspects of rules and such, is not how we actually achieve fluency and proficiency in a language. That is why most school and university programmes have the very well-known paltry results. This is why after five or even ten years of learning French in Canadian schools, few Anglophones can sustain a proper conversation in French for fifteen minutes.
This is why you most likely have not actually learned any languages in school. Working with rules has some place in efficient language learning, but not in the way most contemporary language teachers would like.
Grammar as Monitor
Knowing grammar rules can serve as a monitor when you have time to think about how you want to say something, especially in writing. For instance, English native speakers often mistake “its” and “it’s”. The rules are simple and anybody can learn them. If you do know the rule, you can consciously think before writing either “it’s” or “its” and decide which one applies in your current context.
There are a few examples like this in any language. In German, native speakers struggle with the differentiation between “das” and “dass”. You can also easily learn that rule. In Italian, people often struggle with when to deploy the apostrophe, like in the case of “c’entra” or “centra”.
Here we can also see why it’s so absurd to try and learn grammar rules and then speak by consciously thinking about them. You can maybe do that every once in a while in conversation, and you can do it when you have time to really think about what you are going to say, namely when you don’t actually say it but write it.
You can’t do that for everything (or even most things) you want to say. Luckily, you don’t have to either. We get used to the right way of saying things by being exposed to it enough. That’s how we learn.
That it works is clear and most people accept it, too. The question that remains is that of efficiency. It is effective, sure, but what about time? That is a very good question indeed. As much as I like learning languages, I want to learn quite a few of them and I also want to do other things, so being efficient in my learning is very important to me.
The reason why it is so much more efficient to also learn your vocabulary with massive amounts of interesting input rather than with conventional classroom exercises and lists etc. is similar to the reason you can’t talk by memorizing grammar rules.
One could still argue that one could learn the vocabulary by using flashcards and word lists though, couldn’t one? Yes one could. It is an effective method, i.e., it works. It’s just not efficient though.
If you read for half an hour on LingQ or in a book, you will be exposed to hundreds or thousands of different words. Many words will repeat. That is also why it’s generally bad advice to start learning the 2,000 most common words, or something along those lines. If you read and listen a lot, you will see those words, by definition, most often. They will be among the first you will therefore learn.
There are many more benefits to using this method. You will learn words in the areas your are interested in and many more. So, if you care to read about cars and Dante, you will be able to talk about those topics, and you will learn all the most common words that you need for daily interactions anyway.
If you spend your time reading and listening to interesting things, you also spend your time twice as efficiently: First, you learn the language you’re trying to learn. Secondly, you also learn about a topic that interests you. You might learn about human nature by reading history and literature. You might learn about self-improvement by reading Carnegie or you might learn about your professional field by reading materials that deal with those topics.
I think, one doesn’t go too far in saying therefore, that the most effective, efficient, and pleasant way to learn a language is to use massive compelling comprehensible input.
(I don’t want to abuse your patience, therefore I will not discuss what it means exactly to use “comprehensible” input, or what kind of input is comprehensible enough, and so on. I have done so in the book, and I will do so elsewhere on this blog.)
How to Learn a Language in Practice Then?
If logical reasoning and some data are not enough to persuade you, and you think about going back your old grammar and exercise books from school in order to finally learn Spanish, then I suggest doing a little experiment first.
After reading this article (and maybe the book) and understanding the method, just try it out for a week or two. If you do decide to work with comprehensible input, spoken or written, you will feel immediately that it works. I was rather sceptical when I first tried it because I was biased towards the widely spread conventional methods, since this is how we learn it in school (well, learn it…), and since I strongly believe in hard work and resilience, I thought it best to just go at it harder.
Then I listened to Mr Kaufmann and was very impressed with his reasoning and his personal results. So I gave LingQ a try, which is his online learning page, where you can use comprehensible input in an environment that helps you to overcome the hurdles of not understanding anything in the beginning, and it worked very quickly.
I would ask you to go to LingQ or pick up a graded reader or an otherwise semi-comprehensible text, whatever you prefer and have access to – spending money is not required; just go with what you can find and have an interest in – and then try it out. If it doesn’t work for you, you can just go back to your grammar books after a few weeks. I have never heard of anyone who actually did do that, though.
Should one only use input? Is there something one should do first or in the beginning in order to speed things up? Olly Richards recommends going through a course book in the very beginning, in order to get a grounding in the language and learn the first words. I agree with that to the extent that it is indeed necessary.
As you can see in the examples in the book, there is a basic difference for a native English speaker between learning Spanish and Japanese or French and Chinese. Because of the linguistic distance, Spanish being relatively close to English and Japanese being relatively far away from English, it becomes more difficult for English speakers to learn Japanese than Spanish.
Yes, there are other hurdles and challenges in Japanese, like the characters. The main problem, however, is that we can’t understand anything at all in the beginning. Whereas in Spanish, we recognize the meaning of many words immediately because they are close to what they mean and how they look in English.
This principle is even more apparent in very closely related languages, like Spanish and Italian. If you are a native English speaker but you have learned Italian already, you can learn Spanish in a quarter of the time or so because it is so similar and you are half-way there already when you begin. This is exactly what I did personally. I had learned Italian in a year or so and picked up Spanish in little more than three months (although it takes much longer to speak it properly without having Italian interfere; similarity can also be a downside).
Japanese on the other hand can take several years if you don’t speak any other Asian languages and therefore have to inch your way forward. In Spanish one can start to run from the get go, whilst in Japanese one has to learn to crawl first.
This is generally where the difficulty in learning languages comes from. We need to have some words and patterns first, we need to get them somehow, and then we can start to run and it’s a blast.
Bridge the Comprehensibility Gap
This answers one of the major concerns people have when learning with input is recommended to them. You ask me to read (and listen), but I don’t have words! Yes. There are three ways to overcome this problem. You can use graded readers, you can use LingQ, and you can use course/starter books, like Living Language, which I used for Japanese.
Graded readers give you easy texts for your level. They have simple sentences and use simple patterns so you can grasp them quickly. They normally provide glossaries and translations etc. so you can learn your first few hundred words or so.
LingQ is like a graded reader, only that you can choose what you want to use for learning, so you don’t need to depend on boring zoo stories or fairy tales and the like. You can start with newspaper articles for example or with literature immediately.
Compelling comprehensible input is what works best. If you are really interested in what you read or listen to, you will learn much more much more quickly.
Compelling Input vs. Artificial Learner Materials
This is one of the most fundamental differences between input from text books and other artificial learner materials and authentic native speaker content. The one is artificial and not compelling at all, the other is interesting, because you can choose what you like, and what is interesting to you – and some of it is downright compelling, like a favourite novel, say. That is why I love using LingQ, because I can choose what I want to use.
If you don’t want to spend any money, you can work with whatever is available at your local libraries and whatever you can find for free on the Internet. You can download audio and text for free at LingQ as well. One can certainly do it like that, but I like to buy some TV-shows on DVD or Blu-ray that I like and I buy lots of books anyway; so that barely counts.
Netflix and other streaming services can also make a learner’s life easier.
With resources like LibriVox, Project Gutenberg and YouTube there is no need to spend any money, though. It just makes things easier and much more pleasant.
Also worth noting is that the classes many people take cost them hundreds and even thousands of dollars, pounds and euros. With all that money I can easily learn five languages using my compelling input in the comfort of my home, with the difference that I will actually learn them…
Now, In the book I go into all the details and minutiae of language learning, but this is the gist of it: Go and find comprehensible input and then listen to and read these materials. If one picks stuff that is slightly above one’s level, or even not that slightly, we will learn (or acquire…) our new language, not in no time, but quickly enough.
Don’t Worry And Plan So Much, Just Do
Remember Art Williams? Just do it!
Keep in mind that language learning is simple but not easy. It’s hard, but in the end it is also simple. Read and listen a lot. Read and listen to things you find interesting and compelling. Do it often, preferably every day. Keep doing it for a few weeks, and you will immediately notice the progress.
Also, don’t worry about problems like: I won’t be able to read native speaker content. That is much too hard to understand. That’s not realistic! If it really is still too hard, you can bridge that gap with artificial learner materials from course books and readers in the very beginning.
Even in the harder cases it will only be matter of a few short weeks or months, until you can use native speaker content, from podcasts to books, from newspapers to radio shows and television. It is not unrealistic at all and in the linguistically closer languages it can happen much sooner than many people seem to think intuitively.
Don’t forget that our goal is to finally speak the language fluently – always assuming this is your goal; there are other sensible goals as well.
In order to speak fluently, we need to first understand fluently, and we need to understand everything from people speaking casually in shops, talking on the phone, slurring words in a bar, screaming over music, pronouncing not very clearly after reaching their 70th birthday, talking in slang and speaking with strange accents.
Variety of Real World Speech
Nothing can prepare us for that variety of real conversations with real people like listening to and reading authentic native speaker content. There is also one phenomenon for which course books and classes almost never provide materials and solutions at all: The connected speech of daily life can be extremely different from the slow, artificial speech of text book dialogues.
If you struggle to understand native speakers although you have learned the language for two years, you’re doing it wrong. Have you mainly used learner content? Stop that. Listen to the real deal.
Just think of how you speak your own mother tongue. If you’re English, you probably won’t say: It-is-somewhat-hard-to-understand-native-speakers-when-they-talk-at-normal-speed. It will sound more like this: Itis-somewha-hard-tounderstand-nativespeakers-when-they-talk-at-normalspeed. Now do this in Cockney and drop a few more letters.
Or put in phrases like India after 1900. If you are English, you will say, probably without even noticing it, Indiarafter 1900. It will be connected and you will add an r in order to make the vowels transition more smoothly. Most English people do it and don’t even realise they do it. Now imagine the poor sod from India trying to understand what you just said about his country after merely working with course books for two years.
The main goal is to learn the words first, somehow, so it’s no problem if we use artificial learner content in the beginning, or if we use literature and television shows from by-gone ages – all this doesn’t matter, as long as we actually learn the words and learn them fast. Since we will get lots of exposure to authentic, contemporary content as well, especially towards the end, we will pick up all the necessary contemporary vocabulary, we will understand different accents, we will have heard slang and slurring, and we will be able to make ourselves understood.
Also, I keep on saying read and listen. Yes, you can only listen, if you like. Reading is the best source for rich and complex vocabulary as well as for the more frequent words. I show why the combination of reading and listening is best in the book, but let me tell you at this point that I chose this slightly pretentious, cocky title about “reasonably smart people” for two reasons.
First, I was sick of all the guides for dummies etc. But then, it is also true that if you are reasonably smart and like to read, you will be so much more effective, efficient and successful at language learning – and that goes for your mother tongue as well as for any other languages you might care to pick up.
I like to think of this process as a serious of different resolutions. We start with the big picture and have only a very bad resolution. We try to see anything, anything at all. Then, once we can make out what’s in the picture, we zoom in more and more to see more details. At different times we focus on different quadrants of the picture. In the end, when we will have reached fluency, there will still be some details left to be discovered, but we know what the picture is about and are familiar with its most important aspects as well as with some of its minor details.
Thanks to all the input, the words will make their way into our minds automatically. On a poetic note one might be inclined to call this magical. It is a beautiful thing indeed.
When To Speak?
Read and listen a lot. Keep doing it for a few months, and at some point your reservoir will overflow. You will start to speak because you really want to.
If you’re not familiar with linguistics and online-polyglot discussions, you might not know that there is a language theory war being fought, devastating large swathes of internet and academia fighting grounds.
There’s the army of the Early Speakers who wage war against the forces of the Late Speakers. Both sides are quite convinced that they’re right, and they fight to the last. Both sides have a sect of fanatics, namely the Early Speaker Guerrilla and the Late Speaker Silent Monks.
The Early Speaker Guerrilla go out on day one and start attacking people by babbling and rambling in their vague direction. They lay ambuscades, and whenever a poor civilian happens to pass by, they just spray him with a cloud of incomprehensible gibberish and noisy drivel.
The Late Speaker Silent Monks take a vow of absolute silence on day one. They don’t speak to anybody for three years. If they are learning Italian and the Italian President happens to call, they will refuse to speak to him. They believe that their correctness of speech, their fluency and the whole meaning of their learning activities will be sullied if they attempt to speak the foreign tongue before they’ve really, really, really learned it.
If you have read your Sherlock Holmes, you will by now have deduced that I don’t subscribe to either sect. My bias goes toward the forces of the Late Speakers though. If you ask me: “Pray tell, when should I start to speak my new language?” I would reply “Speak it, when you have something to say, or when you get a good opportunity – whichever comes first”.
That is to say, it is better to wait, because you just don’t get much out of speaking early, and you are going to waste lots of time, nerves and patience if you do start to speak early.
Nobody Wants to Speak to You (Or Is It Just Me?) – Get Over It
Nobody would want to speak to you early on. Put yourself in the native speaker’s shoes. Some random person walks up to you and mumbles something at you. Do you want to talk to someone who just can’t express himself yet? I don’t. I like to talk to people from around the world. It is indeed one of the major reasons I like to learn languages. Nonetheless, I don’t want to really talk to somebody with the vocabulary level of a three-year old. Do you?
Now, you could pay someone to speak to you. That is what you should do, in fact, once it is time to speak. You could use italki, which I recommend and use myself. You will spend a lot of money to little effect if you decide to do that early on.
The optimal decision would be to start speaking, when you can start to think in the language, or to be more precise: When you walk down the street and random bits of the foreign language pop into your mind. You walk down a rural street and find yourself saying: “Behold, une vache!”
Then the time is ripe. Also, generally, when you can sit by yourself and speak for three minutes straight without having to think too much about what you need to say in order to say what you want to say. You know the time is right when you watch a television show and you can understand 90% of it.
You can do what you like, of course. If you have both lots of time and lots of money, well then go and speak early. If you are looking for the most effective and efficient approach, go with what I say. I also go over some special cases in the book, but this is the gist of it.
Conclusion
This may still seem somewhat counter-intuitive but it is nonetheless true. Read and listen, and then you can speak. Emerson famously said: First we read, then we write. The connection is closer than one might think at first glance. If you want to think, you need to read (and listen) first. Literacy improves proportionately to one’s reading (and listening).
The better the quality and the greater the amount of input, the better one can read and write. It works exactly the same in learning foreign languages. First we read and listen, then we speak.